Insurance

I fully intended to post last night, had started to write, in fact, when I blew a fuse in my new writing space and couldn't get the computer back on. I was so determined to follow through that I logged onto the blog on my iphone, but once there, could not figure out how to get to the "New Post" space, which is probably a good thing, considering how long it takes me to pound out a one-line text message.

Moving on. 

A few nights ago, Lily was two floors down playing with our old neighbors after school. When I went to get her at dinnertime, with Annika in my arms, she insisted on taking the stairs with her friends instead of coming up in the elevator with me and Annika. When we reached our floor, the three children were not there. 

I figured they had run up and were in the apartment, but there was no sign of them, and when I walked around calling them, nobody answered me. I left Annika with the babysitter and ran back down to our old floor, but they weren't there, either. I ran up to the sixth floor and down the stairs to the lobby, stopping on every floor to call for her, alarming some neighbors in the process, a few of whom offered to help me look. 

By this point, I was in a legitimate panic. I had received a few emails earlier in the week about an assault on a child in our neighborhood, and although I couldn't imagine she would run out of the building without me, it was beginning to seem like she wasn't inside. I ran back up to our apartment and made another round, calling her name. In the playroom I heard a tiny voice, responding to the fear in mine, I imagine, say, "We're here. We're hiding behind the chairs." 

Needless to say I sent the neighbor children home in no uncertain terms, and sank into one of the offending chairs to catch my racing breath. "I'm sorry, Mama," Lily kept saying, but now that I'd found her, I could barely look at her, I was so overwhelmed by relief and anger in equal, dueling measures.

The rest went as you'd expect: I yelled, she seemed appropriately frightened by both my yelling and the ensuing, calmer discussion about what could befall a young child separated from her parents. I started breathing normally again, then had a flashback later in the evening of how it felt to think--even for an instant--that she was gone, and found myself checking my pulse, sinking to the floor to gain composure.

And then, as I was trying to fall asleep that night, remembering this: Two girls, small girls, with long brown braids and hand-knit cardigan sweaters, standing on the deck of a ferry boat. Faces lifted to the sky, to watch the seagulls swoop for the pieces of bread held out by other passengers, bodies close to the rail, heads barely above it. A breeze, a mild breeze on a sunny  summer afternoon, and a man, my father, gripping our arms, pulling us away from the railing, fearful, as he explained while pulling, that the wind would somehow whisk us over the rail and into the frothy green sea. 

As a child, I thought this was insane. As young adults, we mocked my father for his foolish "physics." How, indeed, could a mild breeze cause a 40-pound child, two of them, to be lifted into the air and over a four-foot iron railing? As a parent, with a mere few minutes of uncertainty, I understood the utter lack of logic, the desperate desire to hold onto an illusion, at least, of control. 

We will be on that ferry soon. My girls will want to watch the seagulls swoop while pressed against the railing. I will let them. But I will be standing there, too.